Criterion Sunday 648: Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960) (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961)

It’s weird the way that films from the 1960s, and particularly the French New Wave, feel so much more contemporary than films from even a decade before, partly I suppose because a lot of the techniques which that movement made commonplace are ones that are still heavily used today, and the ideas they created inform so much of contemporary media culture and modernity itself. Look, I’m not a philosopher or a sociologist, so I can’t really speak to this in depth, but suffice to say that when watching this film from a mere 62 years ago (further ago than the turn of 19th century was to the film), it’s difficult to take in what a break it represented, as the film which begat the term cinéma vérité, extending New Wave ideas of location shooting on the streets of Paris to the documentary form (though Rouch had done plenty of documentaries before this which use some of the same techniques, so it wasn’t exactly the first). However, as the first film to claim this description, it’s also more nuanced and more self-aware than we might expect: the directors are frequently referenced, and the film ends with a sequence wherein the participants are shown the film and asked to comment on themselves and how they are represented.

All that aside, it’s of more than just film historical interest. The filmmakers begin with some simple vox pops asking people if they’re happy, but quickly spin off into more in-depth discussions. Most notably, they have Marceline Loridan (who would go on to work with and marry documentarian Joris Ivens, being integrally involved in some of his grandest works, like How Yukong Moved the Mountains). A young woman in 1960, she speaks of her childhood spent in a concentration camp, in a moving sequence that spins off from discussion of the tattoo on her arm, though it’s employed in the context of racism against African students she’s speaking to, so it all becomes quite complicated to parse.

Certainly there’s a constant dialogue in the film between its supposed veracity and how much of this is constructed or performed, further brought out in the final sequence of its interlocutors speaking to their own appearance on film. My point, garbled as it is, may merely be that there’s a lot here to unpack, and I think it demands active engagement, but it’s quite an achievement as both a film and an advance in documentary practice.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin; Cinematographers Michel Brault, Raoul Coutard, Roger Morillière and Jean-Jacques Tarbès; Length 90 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 28 May 2023.

Criterion Sunday 647: On the Waterfront (1954)

Undoubtedly a classic film, one that had a lasting impact on the film industry and on screen acting. That of course may be its greatest legacy, but it’s a film suffused with the craft of generations of American filmmakers, feeling of a piece in its carefully-toned monochrome with the films noirs of the decade before, and has all the hallmarks of a prestige drama, bolstered by a fine line-up of character actors all doing some of their best work. It’s a pity then that it feels like an attack on the idea of unions — which is a problematic message to take from Elia Kazan — as these dockworkers are shown in impotent thrall to the power plays of the criminal gangs who could have been union-busting thugs but instead feel like the unions themselves. In a sense I suppose the physical world of work on the docks is just a backdrop to an internal struggle, but it boils down to: whether to go to the cops when you’ve witnessed a crime; whether thereby to save your eternal soul (a rather heavy-handed part nevertheless laid down with conviction by Karl Malden). Still, it has some classic speeches, some great scenes and some arresting cinematography.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Elia Kazan; Writers Budd Schulberg; Cinematographer Boris Kaufman Бори́с Ка́уфман; Starring Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Eva Marie Saint; Length 108 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Monday 22 May 2023 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, September 2000).

Criterion Sunday 643: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

I’ve not seen either of Hitchcock’s films of this title, though the 1956 one with Doris Day and James Stewart is much the more famous. However, this British film from his mid-1930s period is still pretty tight — it has a 75 minute running time! — and has a lot going for it. The central couple (Leslie Banks and Edna Best) have that familiar chipper upper-middle-class moneyed English way about them that a lot of pre-war heroes seemed to have in British cinema, as Brits abroad, holidaying in Switzerland. They’re sorta nobodies, but they have their particular skills: she’s a good shot with a rifle (hmm) and he… well, to be fair, I don’t remember very much about Banks’s Bob Lawrence. He’s fairly unflappable, which is always a good quality, and he has a habit of pushing his nose fairly fearlessly into things, which certainly helps this plot. As it happens, they unwittingly uncover some international intrigue — it’s just what happens to English people on their European holidays — and must piece together the plot and foil a murder that could destabilise the whole world. So the stakes couldn’t be higher, and Peter Lorre is the manifestation of this vaguely Germanic threat (never specifically stated, and Lorre himself had to learn his lines phonetically, having fled the Nazis not long before). He has some of the same baby-cheeked menace he had in M, with a streak through his hair and a prominent knife wound on his forehead used to hint at his dangerous personality. It’s all what we would consider classically Hitchcockian and certainly one of his successes of the pre-Hollywood era.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Alfred Hitchcock; Writers Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis; Cinematographer Curt Courant; Starring Leslie Banks, Edna Best, Peter Lorre; Length 75 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 7 May 2023.

Criterion Sunday 623: Lonesome (1928)

This is technically not a silent film, but it’s also not not a silent film. In fact for much of its running time, it’s an exemplary advertisement for the freedom and artistic possibilities that the medium had reached in the year after the similar Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans was released, because when the brief segments with synchronised sound come they literally stop the film in its tracks. What is a city symphony for New York City, with loose impressionistic photography, heady use of lap dissolves and location shooting, suddenly becomes for about a minute each time a static and ugly dialogue scene with an unmoving camera and no real sense of place. Luckily, those scenes pass quickly, largely self-contained, leaving Lonesome to be a sweepingly romantic film about two people who find each other by chance, visit Coney Island, then are separated just as (un)fortuitously (by the cops no less, going above and beyond their duty of care), and that’s pretty much the plot of the thing. However, it’s a fairly swooning film that for all its slender plot still manages to carry you along.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Pál Fejős [as “Paul Fejos”]; Writers Edward T. Lowe Jr., Tom Reed and Mann Page; Cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton; Starring Barbara Kent, Glenn Tryon; Length 69 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), London, Friday 10 March 2023.

Criterion Sunday 613: Sommarlek (Summer Interlude, 1951)

One of Bergman’s earlier films, he’s finding his way to some of his most enduring themes here, via the story of a traumatic past haunting the present for a ballerina, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson). But it’s not just trauma: there are truly happy moments that seem to mock her from the past, as she labours in misery with a rather priggish and accusatory boyfriend (Alf Kjellin). Of course, her first love Hendrik (Birger Malmsten) had his faults too, but the past scenes, teenage years by a lake, lit brightly, with an effervescence to them, feel like a different film (despite the actors being the same). They pick wild strawberries, they go for a swim, there’s a joy that’s clearly lacking in the present day scenes. But light and darkness are intermingled, and the memories of the past can bring respite to us, though as ever in Bergman the solaces of religion are of variable quality.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Ingmar Bergman; Writers Bergman and Herbert Grevenius (based on a story by Bergman); Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer; Starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjellin; Length 96 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Tuesday 17 January 2023.

Criterion Sunday 604: In Which We Serve (1942)

A solidly crafted flag-waving exercise in wartime uplift, about the way a diverse (well, diverse from a class-based background at least, if literally nothing else) group of fighting men on a navy ship come together through adversity. The film is largely told in flashback as the HMS Torrin lies crippled and sinking after the Battle of Crete, as some of the surviving crew reflect on how they came to be there. Turns out this is a fairly effective narrative strategy, allowing both for the setbacks of war (the sinking of the ship, the loss of life) to intertwine with the duty and service that motivate these men, most of whom are lifelong Royal Navy crewmembers, and the wives and children that wait for them back in England — and indeed, given the fairly limited screen time, it’s the women who give some of the film’s best performances. Writer and co-director Noël Coward himself plays the ship’s captain, which makes sense given his own leading involvement in getting the film made, and he acquits himself well enough, in the soulful vein of a by-the-book type who nevertheless has great admiration for all his crewmembers (except for a baby-cheeked Richard Attenborough, who abandons his post in one memorable vignette), but it’s the emotional story between John Mills and Bernard Miles which is most satisfying. All in all, this is well-made and probably the film for its time, but it’s still pretty boilerplate as a wartime fighting film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Directors Noël Coward and David Lean; Writer Coward; Cinematographer Ronald Neame; Starring Noël Coward, John Mills, Bernard Miles, Celia Johnson, Kay Walsh, Joyce Carey; Length 114 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 1 January 2023.

Criterion Sunday 601: Неотправленное письмо Neotpravlennoye pismo (Letter Never Sent, 1960)

Of Soviet directors working in the 1960s, you hear plenty about Andrei Tarkovsky (and for good reason), but even compared to him there are not many directors that have the kind of visual bravado that Mikhail Kalatozov deployed in his features (like The Cranes Are Flying of a few years earlier). Letter Never Sent is fairly laconic in terms of its dialogue — it follows three geologists and their guide Konstantin (Innokenty Smoktunovsky) as they search for diamonds in a far-flung stretch of Siberia — but you really get the sense of this environment, with elemental forces (fire, earth, snow) competing with one another for primacy over the image. The actual quest itself hardly seems as important as the relationship between these four humans and the impossibly deserted land they find themselves in, and there’s even a bit of critique of the Soviet system, as their work soon gets derailed and they have trouble getting in touch with headquarters. Still, it’s nail-biting thriller territory for the most part, and Kalatozov’s camera gets the most out of its struggle-against-nature narrative.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• This is one of the more bare bones releases Criterion has ever done, with no additional features aside from a booklet essay. Would that there were more resources detailing the making of this film though, because it must have made for a fascinating story.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Mikhail Kalatozov მიხეილ კალატოზიშვილი; Writers Grigory Koltunov Григорий Колтунов, Valery Osipov Валерий Осипов and Viktor Rozov Виктор Розов; Cinematographer Sergey Urusevksy Серге́й Урусевский; Starring Innokenty Smoktunovsky Иннокентий Смоктуновский, Tatiana Samoilova Татья́на Само́йлова, Vasily Livanov Василий Ливанов, Yevgeni Urbansky Евгений Урбанский; Length 96 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Thursday 29 December 2022.

Criterion Sunday 600: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama stands up even today as a pretty intense piece of work, not least because it was breaking several taboos for its time — in detailing a fairly horrific crime in scientific detail, they were making a film that wasn’t for all ages, and indeed there’s plenty of incidental details to suggest a rather troubling existence. It’s Lt Fred Manion (Ben Gazzara) who’s on trial, for the murder of his wife’s rapist, but it might as well also be Laura Manion (Lee Remick) who is too, given the extent to which she is subjected to scrutiny also (I can’t think of any movie, old or new, which has so relished repeating the word “panties” quite so many times). Of course, the focus is on James Stewart’s defence counsel, who is seen putting on a performance to try and get his client off the charge, and when put together with the rather dubious nature of the reality being deconstructed in this small Michigan courtroom (and this is one of the few films I’ve seen set on the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of that state), it’s a compelling black-and-white drama that leaves us with no clear conclusions about who’s in the right and who is in the wrong, but it’s an essential film for fans of the courtroom drama.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Otto Preminger; Writer Wendell Mayes (based on the novel by Robert Traver); Cinematographer Sam Leavitt; Starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, George C. Scott, Arthur O’Connell; Length 161 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 24 December 2022 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, April 2000).

Criterion Sunday 596: 三匹の侍 Sanbiki no Samurai (Three Outlaw Samurai, 1964)

There are no shortage of samurai films (chanbara or sword-fighting films, if you will) in the Criterion Collection, and the more one watches of them, the more you start to perceive certain critiques of contemporary Japanese society within them (perhaps analogous to the US and its Westerns). Samurai can be seen as fiercely loyal, they can follow their own strict codes of morality, or they can be guns for hire, freelance agents recruited by landowners to do their bidding, often oppressing dissent or basically committing assassinations to bolster their retainers’ power. Variations of all these ideas are seen in this film, as plenty of the samurai we see seem motivated by little more than money; the titular three are outlaws, perhaps, in the sense to which they rebel against the interests of landed money in siding with the peasantry (from whom some of these samurai were originally drawn). And so this is a steely black-and-white swordfighting film with a sense of justice in those being oppressed, with some excellent central performances (Isamu Nagato is my favourite of the three), though ultimately it can still function well as a fun fight film (with perhaps over-expressive swordplay sound effects).

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• This really is a bare bones package, with only a trailer included (aside from some liner notes). It’s an interesting trailer, given that it introduces the three actors in contemporary clothes before we see them in clips from the film itself. But that’s really it.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Hideo Gosha 五社英雄; Writers Keiichi Abe 阿部桂一, Eizaburo Shiba 柴英三郎 and Gosha; Cinematographer Tadashi Sakai 酒井忠; Starring Tetsuro Tamba 丹波哲郎, Isamu Nagato 長門勇, Mikijiro Hira 平幹二朗; Length 93 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Sunday 11 December 2022.

Criterion Sunday 594: ゴジラ Gojira (Godzilla, 1954)

You could probably argue that this monster movie is a bit too straightforward in its message — the dangers of a nuclear world can unleash terrifying consequences! — but given the context for the film, it’s pretty understandable. There’s a sub-plot about the moral qualms attendant on technological progress in the field of mass destruction, and at no point is it ever unclear what the reasons for all this hand-wringing are, so you can understand why it was heavily recut on original release for the non-Japanese market, given it hits perhaps a little close to home. Still plenty of other movies of the 50s were trading on the fears of an atomic age, including a number of the most prominent American sci-fi and horror features (along with noir gems like Kiss Me Deadly), so it’s not such a big gap to this Japanese film. Of course, the effects now look pretty dated, but the human drama is clear (this isn’t the only film of 1954 from the Criterion Collection that allegorises Japan’s place in the world and stars Takashi Shimura in a leading role, and it may be my favourite of those) and the sense of night-time Tokyo is strong.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Ishiro Honda 本多猪四郎; Writers Takeo Murata 村田武雄 and Honda; Cinematographer Masao Tamai 玉井正夫; Starring Akira Takarada 宝田明, Momoko Kochi 河内桃子, Takashi Shimura 志村喬; Length 96 minutes.

Seen at home (Blu-ray), Wellington, Saturday 3 December 2022.